Ayaan Hirsi Ali with Jason Hill on Race in America
Ayaan Hirsi Ali Podcast | Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jason D. Hill
FAIR Advisors Hirsi Ali and Hill talk about free speech, immigration, and individual agency. While they express deep concern about the ramifications of the equity agenda and victimhood, they are optimistic about young people’s resilience, Americans’ determination to solve problems, and the importance of those modeling what it’s like to stand up in the face of threats to our republic.
This one-hour interview is excellent, and worth listening to in full. Here are some parts we found most powerful:
Hill on Agency:
JHD: “There is…something quite sadistic about expropriating a person’s agency. If you’re suffering and I am the only person that can relieve you, or am part of a managerial, left-wing class that can relieve you of your suffering, and the purpose of my existence is staked on relieving your suffering, then I must, in some sense, wish to see you continue suffering indefinitely. That is, your emancipation from suffering….would rob me of a very important purpose of my life, which is to keep you crippled, to keep you paralyzed, keep you held onto the belief that you cannot use your agency to solve the problems of your life.”
“[Those] who expropriate the agency of minorities…their purpose is affixed to their sense of superiority, their sense that they are the ones that can repair or restore that person’s damaged agency… [So] the minute you stop suffering, the minute that you are a hero, that you achieve greatness…is the minute you diminish my purpose and the meaning of my life… Behind the guise of humanitarianism lies a very, very sadistic impulse.”
AHA: “If you think, given your background, all that you’ve gone through, that I’m a better person or in a better position to save you than yourself, can you just imagine the arrogance in that?”
JDH: “There’s an arrogance, there’s a sense of sadism…you have…placed yourself as above…in terms of…having a coercive monopoly on the opportunities that you think…the victim doesn’t have…[that they] don’t have the intelligence or…wherewithal…[and] need some sort of steward…or mentor…or guardian… It’s quite arrogant and quite demeaning… Unfortunately, too many people fall prey to this kind of monarchy… There’s a cottage industry…around the cult of victimology… and it pays, it pays very handsomely.”
AHA: It’s a “savior’s supremacy.”
JDH then speaks of the “credentialed insider”… “The black person, part of Black Lives Matter… they are trading on white guilt and profiteering on black suffering, real black people’s suffering, while they themselves aren’t suffering at all.” As for the why, Hill says, simply, “They’re after power.”
Hill on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion:
JDH: “People need to realize that the outcome of all of this is something like a socialist, Marxist, communist government, that’s what the equity movement, under the guise of something that looks quite moral and quite humanitarian—like who would not be in favor of ‘diversity and inclusion’… People get sold through stealth and moral trickery, chicanery, a socialist agenda that’s very, very hard for average people of good faith to fight because everybody wants to be on the right side of history…”
“When you hear ‘diversity,’ you think, yes that’s a good thing. When you hear ‘inclusion,’ you think, that’s a good thing. But most people don’t realize the difference between equality before the law and something like equity… [But there are] nefarious consequences and results of what equity would actually look like… People still conflate [equity] with something like equality, and they really don’t understand the transgression of rights that are involved in achieving something like equity.”
Hill on Immigration:
JDH: “Immigration is a privilege, not a human right… I’m very pro-immigration, but every country has a right to vet its immigrants and to determine by fair criteria the number of immigrants…and the sorts of immigrants…and compassion has to play some role… There are certain illiberal groups of individuals…who should never be permitted in America, but [we can’t] take wholesale groups of people and stamp them with the mark of unassimilables… Careful vetting needs to be done…[but] this country needs immigrants.”
Hill on The Struggle
AHA: We can turn things around—we have no choice. In the face of the evils of the day, what do we give to the next generation, and immigrants?
JDH: “[We cannot] waver in our struggle…to show that we embody the best principles…embody excellence in character, and that we embody that resilience in the face of decline… We are like Sisyphus pushing that boulder… we are exemplars and role models for these young people…to see what it looks like to be an idealist in action in the face of so much that is nefarious and destructive of our great republic.”
Jason D. Hill is a professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and an Honors Distinguished Faculty member. He specializes in ethics, political philosophy, moral psychology, and U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of five books, including the bestselling We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People (Bombardier Books, 2018) and What Do White Americans Owe Black People? Racial Justice in the Age of Post Oppression (Bombardier Books, October 2021).
